Blessed are the poor in spirit: Difficult for the wealthy —but giving covers a multitude…

(CUSA) – Wealth without generosity is a sad thing indeed. Fortunately, the United States of America are inhabited by the most generous people on the planet.

That doesn’t stop some in power from using their wealth to play God and use the government not in service of the people but in service of themselves or work an agenda that denies or suppresses the divine. —Ed.

HOMILY OF POPE FRANCIS MONDAY, MAY 25, 2015

Brothers and Sisters,

The attachment to riches is the beginning of all kinds of corruption everywhere: personal corruption, corruption in business, even small commercial bribery, the kind that shortchanges you at the counter, political corruption, corruption in education …

Why? Because those who live attached to their own power, their own wealth, they believe they’re in heaven. They are closed; they have no horizon, no hope. Eventually they will have to leave everything.
There is a mystery in the possession of wealth. Riches have the ability to seduce, to take us to a seduction and make us believe that we are in a paradise on earth.

Instead that earthly paradise is a place without horizon, similar to that neighborhood I remember seeing in the seventies, inhabited by wealthy people who had built walls and fences to defend their property from thieves.

And living without horizons is a sterile life; living without hope is a sad life. The attachment to wealth makes us sad and makes us sterile.
I say ‘attachment,’ I am not saying ‘good administration of one’s riches’, because riches are for the common good, for everyone. And if the Lord gives them to one person it is so that they are used for the good of all, not for oneself, not so they are closed in one’s heart, which then becomes corrupt and sad.

Wealth without generosity makes us believe that we are powerful like God. And in the end it takes away the best: hope. But Jesus indicates in the Gospel the right way to live.

The first Beatitude: Blessed are the poor in spirit, or the stripping off of this attachment and making sure that the riches that the Lord has given one are for the common good. It’s the only way.

Open your hand, open your heart, open up the horizon. But if you have a closed hand, your heart is closed as the man’s who threw banquets and wore expensive clothes; you have no horizons, you do not see others who are in need and you’ll end up like that man: far from God.